Moving IP addresses across geographically distant locations represents a challenge for today's Internet. There is no easy way to share and relocate an IP address from one datacenter to another one quickly. The process requires route propagation and convergence delay of DNS. BGP and other Internet infrastructure cause delays and overhead making them impractical for production environments such Virtual Private Networks (“VPN”) or for specific applications such as virtual machine live migration. As a result, while server and network redundancy may exist within a single datacenter, current methods to accomplish automatic failover of servers and applications are not efficient and introduce undesirable characteristics to the infrastructure.
For example, an online retailer might utilize a datacenter which may refer to any facility that houses computer systems and associated components, such as servers, virtual machines, telecommunications, and storage systems. Moreover, to provide continued operation in the face of outages (e.g., in the event of a natural disaster), some businesses are able to utilize multiple datacenters in different geographic locations. In this way, when one datacenter fails for some reason, replicated services can be brought online in another datacenter to begin supporting the business. Typically, this involves an Information Technology (“IT”) specialist who is able to activate and configure the network services in the new datacenter as appropriate. Such an approach, however, is a time consuming and error prone process that even if executed flawlessly is still subject to delays in routing table convergence across the Globe. Frequently, the events which call for an IT specialist to move networks is the result of an outage in mission critical services to an organization that has the specialist in an extremely high stress environment, possibly in the middle of the night or while they are in a remote location which makes access to the systems they need to correction impossible. Further, it is common for a network administrator to have to contact a third party upstream provider such as Level 3, AT&T, or IBM to have them make changes. This can result in hours or days of downtime. Some embodiments described herein allow the network administrator to have the network pre-configured in such a way that no network reconfiguration is required at any level to redirect services.
Moreover, in the traditional IP computing environment, the resources allocated to a service include the IP address that is usually bound to a specific physical location. As a result, it can be difficult to relocate the service quickly to another geographical location without a manual IP reconfiguration which in most cases is a difficult scenario because of the time and labor required for Domain Name System (“DNS”) changes/updates, Operating System (“OS”) reconfigurations, and/or external scripts that may be associated with the service current IP address. This invention allows you to use the same IP address in multiple locations in a way that it is configured for automatic traffic redirection and distribution.
Accordingly, methods and mechanisms to efficiently, accurately, and/or automatically facilitate IP relocation across geographically distance locations instantly, will be provided in accordance with some embodiments described herein.